


The Woman That Fell From the Sky

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff, Inspired by Music, No Sex, One Big Happy Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-30 12:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3936322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanity Fair's Raven Reyes chases down a tip from a college radio station's blog to discover the answer to the most hotly-debated question in the music industry: the identity of "The Woman," the mysterious dark-haired muse at the heart of every classic song by legendary singer/songwriter Marcus Kane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Hunt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A college student slips up in a blog interview and accidentally lets the entire Internet in on the answer to rock music's biggest mystery. Vanity Fair's Raven Reyes is on the case.

**Abigail Griffin: “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky”**

**By Raven Reyes for _Vanity Fair_**

  

 _For nearly fifteen years, speculation about legendary singer/songwriter Marcus Kane’s muse – the charismatic, complicated object of desire at the heart of his most beloved songs, known to fans as simply “The Woman” – has been both the music industry’s most cherished parlor game, and the very private Kane’s most closely-held secret. Then a college student told a blogger a sweet story about her godfather, and the identity of “The Woman” finally came to light._ Vanity Fair _’s Raven Reyes packs her bags for rural New England and finds a truly unforgettable story about an extraordinary woman, the brilliant man who loves her, and the hidden legacy behind some of the greatest music of the twenty-first century._

_ _

This story starts three months before it actually starts. Let me explain.

In late February, a nineteen-year-old pre-med student at Mount Weather University named Clarke Griffin was interviewed by another student named Jasper Jordan, who blogs for the college radio station, for a feature about playlists for studying. In the middle of the interview, Marcus Kane’s “The Girl Inside the Mountain” came on in the office next door, and then – well, things got weird.

The interview is readily available on the Internet and has definitely appeared in your Facebook feed at least thirty times by now; however, as a brief refresher – or in case you are a charmingly analog scholar of pop culture who only gets your news from magazines – we’ve excerpted the relevant section below.

(You may, perhaps, be wondering whether Condé Nast was required to obtain legal permission to reprint this interview from the director of the college radio station. You may also be wondering whether or not that conversation was, perhaps, hilarious. The answer to both is exactly what you think it is.)

_[EDITOR’S NOTE: By this point in the interview they have introduced Clarke to the readers, explained that this is part of a regular feature called “Study Break” where students from different academic departments share their Spotify playlists for studying on the radio station’s blog, indulged in some gentle mockery of the campus coffeehouse music circuit, and moved on to talking through Clarke’s playlist.]_

 

 

> **_JJ: So I think it’s interesting to note here that everything on this playlist is instrumental. That seems to be an area where a lot of our blog followers are very divided in their preferences, I mean as far as study music specifically._ **
> 
> CG: If I’m reading something, I can’t have music with words or I’ll get distracted. So my hardcore study mix is a lot of modern classical. John Adams, Nico Muhly, maybe a little Stravinsky. Sometimes jazz – _Kind of Blue_ is in there too –
> 
> **_Solid choice._ **
> 
> Can’t go wrong with Miles Davis. But if I need an energy boost, I usually turn to – _[There’s a weirdly long pause in which Griffin appears to be distracted by music coming from next door]_
> 
> **_You okay?_ **
> 
> _[laughing]_ Sorry. Yes. Sorry. I disappeared for a minute. It’s this song.
> 
> **_We’re huge, dorky Kaniacs in this office._ **
> 
> Yeah. Sorry, I’m just – this is a little weird, I’m not used to –
> 
> **_Is it too loud? I can have Harper turn it off._ **
> 
> No, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. Seriously. It’s just . . . Like, I don’t know if there’s a non-weird way to explain this, but –
> 
> **_You hate this song._ **
> 
> No! No, it’s – he wrote it for me.
> 
> **_Wait, what?_ **
> 
> Yeah, he’s my godfather.
> 
> **_Marcus Kane._ **
> 
>  Yeah.
> 
> **_Marcus Kane is your godfather._ **
> 
> Yeah, he’s known my mom for like twenty years.
> 
> **_Who’s your mom?_ **
> 
> Oh, she’s not, like, famous. She’s a doctor. Her name’s Abby. I don’t actually know how they met or anything. I don’t think I really got what a big deal he was until I was in high school and I realized other girls had pictures of him as like their laptop screensaver and there were all these like fan Tumblrs and things like that. He was just Marcus. He was always around. He taught me how to play guitar –
> 
> **_Marcus motherfucking Kane was your guitar teacher?_ **
> 
> _[laughs]_ God, don’t print that! I’m terrible. I know like three chords. Don’t tarnish his good name.
> 
> **_So, this is legit. This is – you’re not bullshitting me._ **
> 
> This is legit. I’ll text my mom right now if you want confirmation.
> 
> **_No, I trust you. It’s just . . . insane._ **
> 
> Yeah, I can see that.
> 
> **_So you’re “The Girl Inside the Mountain.”_ **
> 
> Yeah, in a way.
> 
> **_How did that even come about? He doesn’t talk much about the origins of that song at all._ **
> 
> It's a super sweet story.  This one time he was staying with us for the weekend – I think I was maybe seven? Eight? – and I had a terrible nightmare. He and my mom were in the living room, reading, and I came running out there and I was crying and kind of hysterical and was telling my mom I’d had a bad dream about, I forget what, but I think I was maybe trapped underground or something.
> 
> **_That’s dark shit for an eight-year-old._ **
> 
> I think I’d just watched a thing on _Sesame Street_ about anthills that day and it freaked me out.
> 
> **_Okay, that’s hilarious._ **
> 
> Anyway, so I’m crying and yelling and having a little baby meltdown, and Marcus just picked me up in his arms and carried me back to bed and tucked me in and said he was going to give me a present that would make scary dreams go away. And he sang me this song – I think he kind of just made it up as he went – about a princess who lives underground and all the exciting things that happen to her.  And the most important part, he said, was that the mountain was full of secret doors.  She could come and go whenever she wanted, and if she thought she was trapped, she just had to stop and look around because there was always another way.  
> 
> **_I am legit tearing up a little. That's_ bonkers _adorable.  What did your mom think?_ **
> 
> Oh, she loved it. She used to sing it to me herself sometimes. She was never a musician or anything, but she has a really pretty voice. She sang it to me when I couldn’t sleep. She said he’d been writing songs about her for years but he gave the very best one to me.
> 
> _**Wait.** _
> 
> Shit.
> 
> **_Say that again._ **
> 
> It’s not –
> 
> _**Holy shit, Clarke.** _
> 
> Yeah, I don't really want to go into this.  I'd like to cut this part.  I didn't - I wasn't thinking.
> 
> **_“He’d been writing songs for her for years.” That’s what you said._ **
> 
> Can we please go off the record?
> 
> **_You can’t ask to go off the record after you’ve already said it._ **
> 
> Look, it’s not – she’s a super private person, we don’t talk about this stuff.
> 
> **_She’s “The Woman.” Your mom is “The Woman.”_ **
> 
> Look, I can’t – that part’s not my story to tell.
> 
> **_You know you basically just confirmed it, right?_ **
> 
> This interview is over. _[Clarke gets up and leaves the room. She does not return any calls or emails from Jordan or the director of the radio station.]_

* * *

This is where things begin to get messy.

It takes less than five minutes after the blog post goes live before the news finds its way to Twitter and Reddit, and only another five after that before Abigail Griffin’s phone begins to ring and she finds herself under siege. If you would like a foolproof recipe for pissing off an entire community, the best way to do that is to clog up the voicemail of the town’s most respected surgeon with hundreds of requests for autographs and interviews so people who need an appendectomy can't get through.

Abigail Griffin is a public person. Celebrities can go hide out on their private islands when the press is too much for them, but Griffin is a doctor.   It is vital to her work that she be easy to find. The hospital does not have a P.R. team so much as it has a sixty-two-year-old office manager named Ed who occasionally fields inquiries from the local paper. Absolutely no one is equipped for the international media firestorm that ensues. Finally, under great duress, Griffin retains the services of a publicist, who counsels her – correctly, as it turns out – that the majority of these calls are from media outlets, all of whom want first crack at the exclusive story, and once one of them gets it, the hysteria will die down.

This is where I come in.

I should mention here that I knew Abigail Griffin’s name and identity almost three months before everyone else did.

I should also mention that Jasper Jordan’s parents are my next-door neighbors.

A word about music journalists and our strange hobbies.  Sussing out the identity of “The Woman” – the gritty, charismatic heroine of nearly every Marcus Kane song you know and love – has become something of an industry parlor game over the past fifteen years since he burst onto the scene with _The Woman That Fell From the Sky_ and became a legend. Like Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat or Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, she has become an addictive mystery, her identity endlessly debated by armchair experts who have spent years carefully combing through lyrics for clues. Kane's discography paints a remarkably detailed portrait of the interior life of this woman whom we’ve all come to feel, in some way, that we know intimately, but reveals precious few identifying details.  Dark eyes.  A sad past.  A daughter with golden hair.  Not much to go on, until Clarke Griffin showed up.

Kaniacs tend to fall into one of three distinct camps with regard to “The Woman.” One insists she’s fictional.  Or, perhaps more accurately, mythic - the Dulcinea to his Don Quixote, the dream woman he envisions before him but can’t have. Others assert that she’s clearly a composite character, drawing on traits from multiple figures in Kane’s life. There’s something a little infantilizing about this view, I think; it implies no living person could possibly have that complex a personality.

I am in the third camp.

I have always believed she was real, and Jasper Jordan knows it.

He calls me at eleven-thirty p.m. on a Tuesday night, and he is closer to hyperventilating than I have ever heard him. He tells me the whole story, carefully and slowly, like the journalist-in-training he is. Then he reads me the transcript. Then he explains that the interview is part of a series, they’re auto-queued and posted in order, and Clarke’s won’t go up until the beginning of finals week in May. Jasper has not told anyone else at the radio station what Clarke Griffin told him. Nobody else was in the room. His blog posts are password-protected, as is the file on his computer where he stores the recording. “Unless she told anyone else," he said, "and it really didn't seem like she had, for the next three months we're the only two people who know that Clarke Griffin’s mother is Marcus Kane’s ‘The Woman.'" 

I freak out so loudly that Kyle hits me in the head with a pillow until I get out of bed and close the door behind me.

Once in my office, I make Jasper take me through the whole thing again, and again, and again, until I am note-perfect on every detail. Then I thank him profusely, hang up and get to work. I have a head start, but no idea how long it will last.

I decide, upon careful consideration, not to contact Clarke Griffin. I don’t want Jasper to get into trouble, and I want confirmation from another source. So I begin with research. I find everything on the Internet about Abigail Griffin, and I memorize her like a criminal profiler. She was born Abigail Constance Arker forty-three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, only daughter of an elementary school teacher and a circuit court judge. She was top of her class at Harvard Medical School and married environmental attorney Jake Griffin a year after completing her residency at Sloan Kettering. Only a few years later, Jake went out to run errands and never came back; he stopped at the bank to deposit a paycheck, found himself in the middle of an armed robbery in progress, and was shot in the act of calling the police. Clarke was only four years old. Abigail packed up her daughter, sold the apartment, and left a remarkably impressive New York career behind to move to rural Western Massachusetts, about three hours outside the city in a town we’ve been asked not to name. She has lived there ever since.

Nothing in Abigail Griffin’s life would indicate where she could possibly have crossed paths with Marcus Kane, though my instincts immediately zero in on the New York years. Kane would have been an up-and-comer then, appearing from time to time in smaller venues throughout the city. I decide to do some more thorough digging, and call in reinforcements.

There are exactly six people in the world, by my calculation, who know more about the career of Marcus Kane than I do. I call them all. I start with Sylvie Simmons, award-winning biographer of Leonard Cohen, who has been rumored for years to have her eye on Marcus Kane as the subject of her next book. The others include respected music journalists from _Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Guardian,_ the _New York Times_ and the _New Yorker,_ all of whom have profiled Marcus Kane extensively over the years. The sixth is a senior executive from MTV.

Their answers are unanimous. They have never heard of Clarke or Abigail Griffin.

I call my editor and tell her I have a story.

* * *

You may have noticed that there’s a rather obvious piece missing from the story I’ve told you so far.

Marcus Kane.

I assemble my dossier on Abigail Griffin, feeling a bit like a stalker, and I call Marcus Kane’s agent, who I’ve dealt with before many times. She is weird and terse on the phone and tells me she’ll have someone call me back. No one does. I let a couple days go by – Kane just finished a tour, the whole team is probably overworked and exhausted, I don’t want to be a jerk about this – and then try again. This time she does not pick up. I have the email address of someone in the PR office at Kane’s agency, and I try him. I am politely informed that Marcus Kane is not giving any interviews right now. I try the agent again, this time using my editor’s name, leaning rather heavily on the “ . . . from _Vanity Fair_ ” part. I am rebuffed once more, with even greater firmness. I try three more possible contacts and strike out each time. The whole thing is beginning to feel rather surreal – I’ve never found Kane and his team anything less than affable and cooperative in all the six years I’ve worked for this magazine. And that’s when the penny drops, and I realize how stupid I’ve been.

Clarke Griffin is a smart girl. She would have called her mother and her godfather the second she got out of that interview. I do not have the secret head start I thought I had. Marcus Kane did not know who would come knocking on his door to chase down the story of Abigail Griffin, but he knew it was a matter of time before someone did. And I’ve just walked right up and announced myself. “Me! Me! I’m the journalist here to invade your personal life!”

This is not an auspicious beginning.

I leave Kane be for the moment and decide to try another tack. There is, after all, one other person in the world familiar enough with Kane's songs and the stories behind them to potentially confirm whether I’m on the right track with Abigail Griffin.

If I can get to him.

And if he’ll speak to me.

And if he isn’t – as is rumored – certifiably, straight-up batshit insane.

But I’m running out of options, and I’ve already burned through one of my three months, and I’m praying that if Marcus Kane won’t give me the information I’m looking for, maybe his producer will. So I bite the bullet and decide to take a wild swing at contacting the musical legend who sent Kane multi-platinum, whose fanatical and obsessive creative genius helped shape the arc of his entire career, delivering Kane Grammy after Grammy and arguably changing the course of popular music for decades to come.

Enter Thelonious J.

* * *

__

_**Grammy-winning producer & rock impresario Thelonious J (photo courtesy City of Light Records)** _

Compared to spending a week and a half trying to chase down someone from Kane’s management team, the process is laughably anticlimactic. But Thelonious J is the head of a billion-dollar record label, and there is always someone to answer the phone. I call the main line, ask for his office and am cheerfully transferred with no fanfare to one of his many assistants, to whom I introduce myself as a journalist from _Vanity Fair_ who would like to beg five minutes of Mr. J’s time for a very brief phone interview. I am half-expecting a hushed exclamation of horror at my presumption – “ _No mortal is permitted to address Thelonious J!”_ But of course, no man is a legend to the people who do his filing, so she politely asks me to leave my contact information so someone can get back to me. Then she asks me what this press inquiry is in reference to, and I decide to bite the bullet.

“It’s for a piece on Marcus Kane,” I said. “I have some questions for him about Abigail Griffin.” The name means nothing to her, but she promises to pass the message along and somebody will be in contact with me soon.

Twenty-six minutes later, my phone rings. “You found her,” says the unmistakable voice on the other end of the phone. “I’m impressed.”

Thelonious J has called me back himself.

I get no details out of him except validation of the one fact I’ve been running around for five and a half weeks now, trying to independently confirm: Abigail Griffin is “The Woman.”

I know who she is. I know how to find her. And I am the only one.

I call her the next morning. I am careful. I am polite and prepared. I introduce myself as a writer for _Vanity Fair,_ I give her my contact information and ask her to write it down in case she needs to reach me later, and only then do I ask the question I’ve been dying to ask.

She hangs up the phone. When I try back, there’s no answer.

I call five more times over the course of the next week, but Abigail Griffin does not pick up the phone. Neither I nor my editor wants to run the story without her participation and permission, but we are quietly devastated at the thought of someone else beating us to the punch in May when Clarke’s blog post will arrive like a bolt from the blue and pretty much break the Internet. I resign myself to the loss. I take my friends out for drinks and I tell them I know who “The Woman” is and they ask when they’ll get to read about it and I tell them “Never” and sigh into my bourbon.  Kyle hides his Marcus Kane CDs to avoid sending me into another tailspin of irritation like the one that ended with me yelling at the cat.

Then the story breaks. The media goes insane. Griffin's tiny New England town is under siege, with reporters and celebrity stalkers everywhere. The hospital hires extra security. There are flashbulbs in her face in the grocery store. Clarke takes a leave of absence from school, where life has become just as chaotic for her. I am torn between regret for The Story That Got Away and enormous sympathy for these two women caught in the maelstrom of celebrity unprepared.

On June 3rd my phone rings. It’s just after noon. I’m technically on lunch. I consider letting it go to voicemail, and only pick up on the off chance it’s the Thai place calling back to say there’s a problem with my order.

It’s not my lunch. It’s Maya the publicist. “Congratulations,” she says. “Pack your bags.”

I am not sure I'm understanding her correctly.

"She finally realized that the only way for the storm to die down," explains Maya, "is to pick a respectable publication, give one very thorough interview, and everyone else clamoring for an exclusive will go away as soon as there's no exclusive to be had.  And you were first."

"When you say 'thorough -'" I ask her.

"She only wants to do this once," says the publicist.  "She says she'll tell you everything."

Twenty-four hours later, I am sitting on Abigail Griffin's couch.

She tells me everything.

**END OF PART ONE**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have noticed that there was no sexytimes in this one. I'M SORRY! It's just fake magazine interview cuteness. I did, however, give you Raven Reyes as the second coming of Chuck Klosterman, so I hope we're still cool. 
> 
> P.S. Obvs everything in this piece is a zillion percent made up, with one exception - Sylvie Simmons is real and amazing and her biography of Leonard Cohen is the BUSINESS and everyone should go read it.
> 
> P.P.S. If you're looking for Kabby smut, my other two fics ("The Scars That Show" and "Don't Say His Name") should fit the bill nicely.


	2. Massachusetts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven Reyes treks out to rural Massachusetts in search of the hottest scoop in rock journalism this century, and we finally get to meet Marcus Kane's legendary muse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What does singer/songwriter Marcus Kane sound like? 
> 
> First, play these Mark Knopfler songs and listen for these three things: elegant, poetic metaphor; gorgeous, insanely skilled guitar artistry; the woman he loves who is just out of reach.  
> "Golden Heart" - https://open.spotify.com/track/1mVW4t1sh2wwPa5x85Avxv  
> "I'm the Fool" - https://open.spotify.com/track/2cH9tCkDcy143jrZShOsuR  
> "Are We In Trouble Now" - https://open.spotify.com/track/6RLRrhRIsQGEEaedIbr5Na
> 
> Then play these Leonard Cohen songs and listen for these four things: dark, rumbly baritone voice; profound spiritual longing; self-deprecating humility; and insane sex appeal.  
> "Suzanne" - https://open.spotify.com/track/2L93TdW2GMue1H2zlkt30F  
> "Come Healing" - https://open.spotify.com/track/2hmsczw84d5O1dZgnDftRN  
> "Anthem" - https://open.spotify.com/track/7aAE5KL20Uycf3dswsaHjp  
> "I'm Your Man" - https://open.spotify.com/track/5atFAXIgMXP378op4FaxBm  
> "Tower of Song" - https://open.spotify.com/track/5OpDM7JORZzXPo0YIN3vYq
> 
> Then, if you are a "Nashville" fan, sit quietly with your eyes closed and imagine a Deacon Claybourne with a successful solo career and no self-destructive tendencies but the same all-consuming devotion to Rayna, except that nobody knows who Rayna is.
> 
> That's Marcus Kane.  
> ___________________________________________________________

 

 _**Abigail Griffin (photo credit: Nate Miller for** _ **Vanity Fair** _ **)** _

Abigail Griffin does not want me in her house.

She hides it well.  She is impeccably well-mannered from the moment she answers the door, offering me iced tea and sugar cookies. She did not make the cookies herself; Abigail Griffin does not bake. (Clarke bakes, but not for intrusive reporters.) They are from the bakery down the street, displayed on a borrowed two-tier cake stand in the middle of Griffin's kitchen island. The pitcher of iced tea, with glasses and two small glass ramekins of sugar and lemon wedges, sit nearby.  I am not fooled.  This is set dressing – a way to create a false veneer of warmth and welcome, as though I am a cherished guest who dropped by for a chat about what our kids have been up to, not a music critic arrived from New York to dig through the most intimate secrets of her personal life. I am of value to her for one reason only - if I flap my wings hard enough, I will scare the other vultures away.

She knows this.

I know this.

I take a cookie anyway.

I follow her out of the kitchen and into an airy two-story living/dining room, surrounded on the upper level by a mezzanine that leads to the bedrooms and Griffin's office.  I would like a tour, but I don't ask.  The living room, however, is lovely, all white wood and brown leather with accents of blue and green.  It is bright without being antiseptic, homey yet refined.  I could stay here forever.  Two marvelous brown leather club chairs - buttery-soft, cocoa-brown, really the Platonic ideal of Leather Club Chair - sit facing each other in front of a sleek stone fireplace, a small tea table between them.  This is so immediately obvious as the setting for Clarke Griffin's story about the nightmare that the tableau comes to life before me instantly; Griffin in one chair, Kane in the other, books in their hands (Ezra Pound for him, I decide, rather fancifully, and _Freakanomics_ for her) and a shared pot of tea or two tumblers of Scotch within easy reach.  A fire in the fireplace.  A cat somewhere.  Is there a cat?  No, a dog.  A dog sleeping by the fire.  And then little Clarke runs out of her room in tears, and Marcus Kane sings her a sweet, improvised lullaby that will later go on to sell five hundred thousand records.

We do not sit in those chairs. 

We sit, instead, on the other side of the room in front of a large bay window, where a pair of elegant French armchairs face out into the sun.

For a moment or two, as I sip my iced tea and we make idle small talk about my three-hour drive from the city, we size each other up. She is curled up in her chair, legs tucked beneath her – a deceptively relaxed pose. She is in her own home, but she is not comfortable, because I – and by extension _Vanity Fair,_ and thousands of readers, and eventually the entire Internet – are here in the room as well.

It isn’t as though I don’t see her point. This is a tiny town, and she is Doctor Griffin, surgeon and homeowner and parent, patron of the farmer’s market and the mom-and-pop hardware store, purveyor of Halloween candy to trick-or-treating children. She has a clearly-defined identity. If she had wanted to be famous, to tell her story in a magazine, she could have done it anytime, but she didn’t. (She is magnificently uninterested in fame, her own or anyone else’s; later in the afternoon I will overhear her on the phone with a neighbor down the street, thanking her for the loan of a pickup truck. The neighbor in question? Rachel Maddow.) She is well-liked here, after fifteen years of serving the community as not only a doctor but a City Council member, volleyball coach, member of the park volunteer cleanup team and co-chair of the annual Winter Festival. She is one of the most-respected people in town.  And this, I imagine, is the reason why a dozen or so times a year, a very expensive car driven by a very recognizable face appears for a weekend beside hers in the driveway, and the town holds its collective tongue so effortlessly that for fifteen years, no one has put their names together. (Marcus Kane, as it turns out, is well-liked here too. Though he refused any public thanks or acknowledgement, he quietly paid tens of thousands of dollars to restore the 150-year-old pipe organ in the Catholic church the Griffins attend at Christmas, and he may – though this I could not confirm – be a silent partner in the new Main Street wine bar.)

_**The living room chairs we do not sit in** _ **_(photo credit: Nate Miller for_ Vanity Fair _)_**

This entire interview is so surreal, even before it begins, that in some ways it isn’t surprising that the first question of the afternoon actually comes from Abigail to me.

“Do I look the way you pictured?” she asks me, not defensive, but thoughtful, as though she genuinely wants to know. I take the question seriously and appraise her for a moment.  She is by any standard a remarkably lovely woman; petite, with magnificent chestnut hair and dark eyes. She’s wearing a black Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress, no jewelry, very little makeup, and a pair of green silk ballet flats that she kicks off about halfway through our conversation. She looks like all the things she is – a doctor, a community leader, the mother of a college student, the kind of woman who casually borrows Rachel Maddow’s pickup truck for a trip to the gardening supply store two towns over – except for one.

“No,” I tell her. “You don’t. I don’t know why, but you don’t.” I'm worried this is an insult but instead she nods, smiling, as though it was the right answer. She relaxes imperceptibly after that, and some of the tension dissipates. She offers me another cookie. She has one herself.

Okay.  This might not be a disaster.

I ask if she was upset with Clarke when she first heard about the interview. She looks at me in surprise. “Why should I be?” she says. “It’s her song. She can tell the story to anyone she wants, or not. That story doesn’t belong to me.” I nod in agreement, with no idea what I’m missing. I don’t learn what she actually meant until the following week, when I speak again with Thelonious J, who informs me that when Abigail refers to “The Girl Inside the Mountain” as Clarke’s, she is speaking literally. Kane gifted her the rights. She also receives the royalties – held in trust for her until she turned eighteen – which means that lullaby Marcus Kane sang her a decade ago is now paying her college tuition.

There are an almost incalculable number of things I want to ask Griffin, but I am here for three days and I want to start slow.  She is uncomfortable talking about herself - even more so about Clarke - so launching right into a barrage of questions about her relationship with Kane would be disastrous.  I attempt to soften the ground by talking about the music. She knows every song and owns every album, obviously, but I’m somehow surprised at the breadth of her knowledge. She has a musician's ear and flawless taste. She loves _The Woman that Fell From the Sky,_ but not for the obvious reason. In fact, her favorite song from that record is one of the scant handful not about her: “The Eden Tree,” a sweet Appalachian hymn Kane wrote for his late mother. She thinks the critically-acclaimed _I’m Right Here_ suffered from overproduction and finds it a little too glossy, with the exception of “A Better Way," and I learn that she's the one who talked him into recording that track live, without backing vocals or the rest of the band and a light touch on the mixing board.  She maintains that _Salvation_ was disgracefully underrated and that “Hope Is Everything” and “Beaten to Redemption” are some of his best work; she agrees with me (and, it's worth mentioning, with four of those six other Marcus Kane experts I mentioned earlier) that the album deserved to go platinum but could at least have had a fighting chance at gold if not for the very rare occurrence of a tactical misstep on the part of Thelonious J, who co-wrote "Buried Under" and went all in to push it as the album's single.  She shakes her head at the memory.  "'Beaten to Redemption' was the single," she says, "I don't care that Thelonious thought it was too dark."  

"'Buried Under' was too Springsteen for the rest of that album," I say, which is the kind of thing that I say - sometimes yell - at Kyle and friends and colleagues all the time and have become accustomed to standing alone as a solitary voice.

"Exactly," she says, surprised into what is almost a smile.  "I've been saying that for years.  It was jarring.  That song was the E Street Band and the rest of that album was Tom Waits."

"It would have been perfect on _I'm Right Here_ ," I say.

"Oh my God, I know!" she exclaims.  "I _told_ them that.  If they had held that song for a year it would have saved both those albums.  _Salvation_ would have been the concept album Marcus wanted and _I'm Right Here_ would have had a single Thelonious could sell."

_**Abigail Griffin at home in Massachusetts _ **(photo credit: Nate Miller for**_**_ ****Vanity Fair**** _ ** _ **)**_** _

I still don't quite have my head wrapped around what Abigail Griffin's role in Marcus Kane's life and music really is, but one thing has become clear - she doesn't hold back.  She's no meek-mannered muse, hovering over the shoulder of the brilliant male genius and running her fingers through his hair and complimenting his skill.  She is frank and insightful, her feedback honest, her ear for detail highly sophisticated.  There's something in this combination of closeness and distance - she is profoundly intimate with the music but it does not belong to her - that allows her, I suspect, to perceive it more accurately than he does himself.  It reminds me of the way outside adults tend to understand children so much better than their parents can.  (I wonder if teenage Clarke calls Marcus Kane when she argues with her mother.)  Griffin is not merely Kane's musical inspiration; she is his sharpest, most incisive critic.  Over the course of fifteen years, their relationship has ebbed and flowed - not, it seems clear, in ways related to affection but simply proximity, in times when she has been too busy with work or single-parenting, or he has been buried in career demands, for them to spend as much time together as they'd like.  And over the course of the next three days, the thing that becomes staggeringly visible is just how direct the correlation is between Griffin's presence in Kane's life and the creation of his best work.

We talk about music for hours - not just Kane's.  She adores Tom Waits and Lyle Lovett as much as Marcus Kane does, but her music collection does pour forth some enjoyable surprises - a soft spot for Cole Porter, for example, and a non-zero number of ABBA records.  She is a passionate fan of Dusty Springfield.  She borrowed Clarke's copy of _Audra Mae and the Almighty Sound_ and refuses to return it.  I ask her for her opinion, as arguably the most knowledgeable Kane fan on the planet, how she feels about the near-constant descriptions of Kane as “the 21 st-century Leonard Cohen.” She raises one flawless eyebrow at me. “Leonard Cohen is still alive,” she points out. I am suitably chastened, but I take her point; this, I think, is her subtle way of redirecting the conversation away from Marcus Kane the legend, which she has no interest in discussing, back towards Marcus Kane the flesh-and-blood human being. She is spectacularly uninterested in the trappings of his superstardom – I am astonished to learn that she has never even been to his home (“I don’t go there,” she says, “he comes here”). She used to love watching him play dive bars and scrappy underground clubs, but she will not go see him play arenas. She tried that once – bought a ticket off the website like a regular person and everything – but felt so naked and uncomfortable watching thousands of people screaming along to those deeply personal songs that she never did it again. Clarke goes sometimes, when he plays in town, bringing friends along for house seats and backstage tours. I find a YouTube video titled “Marcus Kane Dances With Adorable Little Girl!!!! TOO CUTE!!!!!” where a fan films the singer pulling a probably seven-year-old Clarke onstage with him to dance to “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” and it is so sweet I hardly begrudge the video's owner all those exclamation points. There are thousands of cheering Kaniacs in the arena, but he only has eyes for Clarke, who is beaming back at him as she twirls around the stage. I wonder if she had any idea what was happening. I wonder if she knew then what she must know now about that song and Marcus Kane and her mother.

I would like the chance to talk to Clarke, who is on her way home from a friend's house, but Griffin makes it clear that today's portion of the interview is over.  I am, however, in town for three days, and have been invited back the following afternoon, during which she promises me a tour of the town and - if I'm lucky - a chance to talk to Clarke.  We say a pair of very stiff goodbyes and she walks me to my car. 

I don't drive off immediately, but watch her walk back into her house.  Her relief is palpable. 

Hopefully tomorrow is more productive.

_**The Griffin house as seen from the back yard**_ _**_**(photo credit: Nate Miller for**_**_ ****Vanity Fair**** _ ** _ **)**_** _

Back at the B&B, I spread my notes out on the bed and pull Kyle’s old iPod from my bag, which I have loaded with the entire Marcus Kane discography, including both Greatest Hits compendiums and the two live albums. I’ve met her now. I’ve seen her house. I know what her hair looks like, what her car looks like. I know about her gentle Midwestern parents and her dead husband and her bright, ambitious daughter. I wonder if the music will sound different to me after that. I put the iPod on shuffle and listen. I hear the familiar, lilting, almost Irish opening riff of “The Woman That Fell From the Sky,” and I am transported. “I’m Right Here” is next, then “Beaten to Redemption,” and I’ve been listening for over an hour before I realize that Marcus Kane’s most extraordinary, almost unearthly musical gift has gone unnoticed by the entire world for over a decade.

The songs that are about Abigail Griffin _sound like her._

Remember when you were in college and your stoned roommate played you “Beaten to Redemption” for the first time and it was so magnificently, brutally self-accusatory and desolate that you sort of weirdly over-identified with it and it became the anthem of your secret heart, of your darkest, worst self? And then remember, conversely, the first time you heard “Your Hand In Mine” and felt lifted up, invigorated, just the slightest bit more alive than you had before because the world had these two people in and they had found each other so there’s hope for the rest of us? Remember how there were times you asked yourself how it was possible that the same artist had written both, and wondered if Marcus Kane might be magic?

There is only one magic here, and it’s the simplest, most everyday kind. There is a Marcus Kane with Abigail Griffin, and a Marcus Kane without her, and once you know that the dividing line between the songs is effortlessly easy to spot.  The Abigail Canon has a spice to it, a sharpness.  When he writes about her - when he writes _for_ her - the music comes alive.  Kyle has tracked down a bootleg of old Marcus Kane demos, dating from the mid-90's (well before Abigail Griffin arrived on the scene); even allowing for the ordinary progression of artistic growth any songwriter would undergo in a twenty-year period, it's impossible to ignore just _how much better_ she made him.

It isn’t just the words. It was never just the words.  It's that lilt in the music, that heartbeat pulse, that freshness and color.  She's not just in the stories, she's inside the music too. 

It's the most extraordinary musical tribute of adoration I've ever encountered in my life. 

I sit in my hotel room, listening to Marcus Kane for hours as the sky turns from blue to rose to violet and then darkens around me, and I suddenly find myself wondering about Jake Griffin - and how the last two decades of rock music might have been altered forever if he had lived.

I already know I will not say this to Abigail.

**END OF PART 2**


	3. Clarke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven wonders about the ultimate cost of chasing down the story of a lifetime, and gets the chance to talk to Clarke.

_**Marcus Kane and Thelonious J pose for post-concert pictures backstage with Clarke and friends (photo courtesy Clarke Griffin)** _

Clarke Griffin isn't quite sure what to make of me.

I can tell - I have met teenagers before - that there's a part of her that finds this whole process fascinating, that thinks having a _Vanity Fair_ reporter asking her questions is kind of exciting and cool.  There's another part of her that desperately wants to give off the vibe that she is magnificently unimpressed, this is nothing new, just another day, she's seen it all.  This is all pretty standard.  But there's an undercurrent of barely-restrained fear simmering just beneath the surface, and it takes me a few minutes to put my finger on it.

She's afraid I'm going to ruin her mother's life.

I'm here for my big fancy cover story, and then I'm going to leave and go back to the city, and she will have to pick up the pieces if her mother's life is destroyed by this.  And I don't have anything to say to her that will reassure her, because the fact is that I actually don't know if her mother's life will be destroyed by this.

But still, I am a rock journalist for _Vanity Fair_ , and Clarke Griffin wants to talk to me.

Abigail was called in to meet with a patient this morning, so I am spending a few hours alone with Clarke.  She pours us both huge mugs of coffee and leads me outside to the back yard.  We take a walk down behind the house to where a thick green lawn slopes away down to a shady creek and sit down on the grass, looking out at the water.  We ease into it - we talk about Jasper, the one real person we have in common.  We talk about college, about Miles Davis, about where I bought the jacket I'm wearing which she appears totally into.  I ask her what has surprised her most about this insane new explosion of internet superstardom that has taken over her life, and this is how I find out that neither she nor her mother have seen Marcus Kane since the news broke last month.

"It was our idea," she says, a little defensively, seeing the look on my face.  I think she's afraid of me thinking less of Marcus for it - which, to be fair, is exactly what I was doing. "Mom told him not to.  She says things are too crazy here right now.  If he comes out here he'll be followed.  It's not fair to the people who live here."

"She must miss him," I say, knowing it's lame and banal.  Clarke looks at me with something approaching scorn in her eyes.

"Of course," she says, as though it's the most obvious thing in the world.

Slowly, as she begins to warm up to me, I get Clarke's side of the story of Abigail Griffin and Marcus Kane.  She has no memories of a time when Kane was not part of her life.  She can't quite recall how old she was when she realized he was more than just a family friend who visited her mother occasionally, but she knows she was very young.  It seemed natural and inevitable to her that they would be in love with each other, but just as natural and inevitable that they would not marry or fully merge their lives.  The Griffins have their world, Kane has his.  Everyone was very happy with this arrangement.  Now Clarke cannot go to class without being hounded by reporters who want to know if her mother is going to marry Marcus Kane and how she feels about becoming his stepdaughter. 

"Everyone else seems to have decided what our family should look like," she says.  "Nobody's asked us what we want."

"What do you want?"

"I want things back the way they were," she says.  "I want it to be easy again.  I want my mother not to be so . . ."  She stops and thinks for a minute, trying to think of the right word.  "Hollow," she finally says, and I realize with a start that she is right.  Hollow is the correct word. Something from deep inside Abigail Griffin has been taken away, and I am complicit in that.  And all Clarke wants is for her mother to be happy again.  For the reporters to leave town and the cameras to go away and the phone to stop ringing and for her mother to smile again.

And for Marcus Kane to come back.

 

_** ** _

_**Clarke and Abigail at a hospital fundraiser (photo courtesy of Clarke Griffin)** _

Clarke and Abigail Griffin are each other's entire world.  They both love Marcus Kane - they are both grateful for his presence in their lives - but their allegiance is first and foremost only to each other.  And not least of the things they love about Kane is how clearly he knows this.  He has never asked for more from Abigail than she is inclined to give him.  He has never crossed lines with Clarke from the realm of Family Friend into that of Surrogate Parent.  All three of them are simultaneously connected, and free.  Abigail does not want to be the arm candy of a handsome celebrity.  Marcus does not want to be the husband of a small-town doctor.  Clarke does not need another father.  Everyone has everything they need.

Or, at any rate, they did before.  Nobody knows how they proceed from here.

I wonder, not for the first time, if I am about to be complicit in the destruction of two women's lives.  I wonder if Abigail Griffin is going to get her heart broken.  I know, in the darkest secret corner of my heart, that even if I knew the answer was yes, I would still be here in Massachusetts chasing down this story anyway. 

I am secretly afraid I am a terrible person.

I text Jasper that night from the hotel room: "What am I doing here?" 

He replies immediately.

"Your job."


	4. Marcus and Abigail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven Reyes finally gets the inside story on the relationship between Abigail Griffin (AKA "The Woman") and Marcus Kane.

 “You want to ask if Marcus Kane is in love with me.”

This is the first thing Abigail Griffin says to me when she returns from the hospital and we finally sit down in the living room to have the conversation that I am anticipating and she is dreading.  She says it calmly, unemotionally, as though she's forcing it out into the open unprompted to save me having to ask.  As though she is ripping off the bandage to save me poking at the wound underneath.

She is wearing yoga pants and a white t-shirt today, her hair pulled up in a messy knot at the top of her head.  She spent an exhausting morning at the hospital and came home to shower, have lunch with her daughter, and meet with me.  There is no Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress today, no perfectly-arranged tray of iced tea and glasses.  She is wearing no makeup, her hair is wet, and we have left the formal downstairs living room behind for a smaller, more intimate upstairs room with a couch and a TV where she and Clarke appear to do all their real living.  I observe a great deal about both of them from this room.  Abigail's book club is reading Cheryl Strayed's _Wild,_ while Clarke is just now getting around to _The Fault In Our Stars._   They are in the middle of a _Veronica Mars_ DVD box set marathon; there are popcorn bowls and throw blankets scattered around that make me wonder if that's what they were doing after I left last night.  This is a room that belongs to real people.  The gap between the mythological woman in Marcus Kane's songs and the small-town mom who reads Oprah book club recommendations on the treadmill is starting to confound me.  But I suppose in some way, isn't that the whole point?  Isn't that what love is?  I can't look at her and see what Kane sees because I don't see her with his eyes. 

And yet, even in this settled domestic normalcy, surrounded by tossed-aside sweaters and IKEA lamps, even with wet hair and yoga pants and no real enthusiasm for this conversation, there is something about Abigail Griffin that I am mesmerized by.  She seems in some way more _alive_ than other people.  She is sharp and animated and a little spiky, and I remember what it felt like to re-listen to Kane's music last night and to feel the way her voice and presence runs through it like an invisible ribbon. 

If I met her right now, I would never know she was "The Woman."  Now that I know, I see it everywhere.

"No," I tell her.  She is startled - and irritated, maybe?  But I'm telling the truth.  That isn't the thing I want to ask.  I explain to her that everyone who has ever turned on a radio since 2001 knows that Marcus Kane is in love with her and that with all due respect, that is not the story I rented a car at LaGuardia and drove through farmland to spend three days in a town with no Starbucks to find.  Marcus Kane is the easy part.  Marcus Kane's side of the story we all already know.  I am here for the hard part.  I want to know what _he_ means to _her_. She looks down, away. She doesn’t want to talk about it. I tell her that this is the question everyone will be asking, and they will go away once she answers it definitively for someone who isn’t them. “It could be worse,” I offer as a joke, “I could be a British tabloid,” and she rolls her eyes as if to ask how different that would be, really, and it’s hard to argue with her. I am here to ask her about a profoundly intimate, decades-long relationship about which she has never spoken publicly and we both know I am not leaving without a story.

And so she tells me the story.

_**Abigail watching Kane perform at an East Village dive bar, circa 1999 or 2000. (photo courtesy of Abigail Griffin)** _

The question Marcus Kane aficionados - from _Rolling Stone_ editors to Reddit conspiracy theorists - were all asking themselves when Clarke's blog post exploded out of nowhere was this: after all the decades of digging into every woman even remotely connected to Kane's life, mining for clues, taking to Google every time he was spotted in public having lunch with a mysterious blonde or kissing the cheek of a pop starlet on the Grammy red carpet, how was it possible that we all overlooked Abigail Griffin?  How did nobody find her?  How did her name never come up when every single woman Marcus Kane had even the most tenuous connection with was put through the ringer and vetted as a possible solution to the mystery?  

The answer is both simple and profound, explaining everything.

We obsessively studied all the women in Kane's life for clues.  We paid no attention to the men.

And so if, for example, Marcus Kane had a childhood best friend named Jake, whose family moved away when the boys were in middle school; and if Jake and Marcus happened to reconnect entirely by accident in New York in the mid-90's, running into each other in the beer queue at a Knicks game; and if later that night Jake had come home to his studio apartment on the Lower East Side and while brushing his teeth that night had called over his shoulder, "Hey, I ran into my old friend Marcus Kane at the game tonight, he's a musician now, I'm going to go hear him play tomorrow"; and if Abby, his girlfriend of four years and a passionate lover of music, who was undressing in the other room (she remembers this with a bizarre specificity, as though it were some kind of a sign - the first time she ever heard Marcus Kane's name she was naked), had been in desperate search of an excuse to get out of her coworker's sister's bachelorette party and said, "I'll come with you"; and if there was only one table left when they arrived at the bar, and it was right up front, and Jake had gallantly given Abby the good seat, so when Marcus Kane walked out with his guitar she was less than ten feet away from him and Jake Griffin was in the shadows behind her; and if the first song he played that night was the sweet, lilting eulogy to his mother, "The Eden Tree"; and if Abby Arker's own mother had just passed away six months ago, and the pressures of her Sloan Kettering medical residency had kept her in such a constant cycle between adrenaline and exhaustion that she had cried a little at the funeral but been unable to cry since, and not just about her mother but about anything, and was secretly perhaps a little bit afraid that a piece of her heart had been shattered forever; and if she sat there in that dim little bar, watching a man with sad dark eyes sing a haunting ballad about death and rebirth, and felt the sound of his voice soak in through her skin, seep inside of her, fill her up, rush through her blood, make her entire body come alive; and if Marcus Kane had looked up at the end of the song to see a beautiful woman with sad dark eyes silently crying in the front row, and looked at her, really looked at her, and she looked back at him, and they were the only people in the entire room; and if Jake Griffin had leaned over just then and tapped Abby on the shoulder to make sure she was okay, and she snapped back to reality and realized that she had become so enmeshed in the song that she had literally forgotten who and what and where she was; and if the rest of the evening was a blur, she remembers none of it, except that she went home that night, back to her own apartment, and climbed into bed and cried for her mother for the very first time, cried so hard that she finally wore herself out with sobbing around four a.m. and then fell asleep, dreaming of Marcus Kane's voice; and if the very next day, Jake Griffin had asked her to marry him and she had said yes . . .

Well, it's easy to see how we all missed that.  Jake was the connection.  But we weren't, of course, looking for him.

* * *

Marcus Kane and Jake Griffin reconnected and remained friends.  Jake and Abby were engaged by the time she was first properly introduced to Marcus, and so even though - as we all know, from "I'm Right Here" and "Buried Under" and half a dozen other songs - he fell immediately and irrevocably in love with her from the moment he looked out through the stage lights and saw her crying, he knew he could never say anything to her.  Perhaps, if we wanted to look closely, we might see in his enthusiastic and loyal friendship to Jake over the years an element of penance - trying to prove to himself that he liked spending time with his friend for his own sake, and not entirely out of the hopes of a few minutes' conversation with his brilliant, opinionated, captivating, stubborn, fiery and beautiful wife.  Marcus knew Abby for five years before Jake Griffin died, and Abby is absolutely insistent upon this point: that even though she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Marcus was in love with her the entire time, and even though her own feelings were not, perhaps, as simple as she would have liked them to be, there was no question of anything happening between them.  There would be no torrid, tragic affairs here.  Abby Griffin woke up one day, about three years into her marriage, and realized that she was in love with Marcus Kane.  She did not love Jake or her daughter any less.  She had no interest in breaking up her family.  This was simply one more difficult thing in a lifetime of difficult things that she would have to summon the strength to bear.  That was all.

That was supposed to be all.

And then it went wrong.

Marcus Kane called her at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, waking her up only three hours after she had tumbled into bed at the end of an all-nighter.  "I had known him at this point for five years," she said, "and he had never called me before.  He only ever called the apartment looking for Jake."  But this time it was her he was looking for.  After apologizing for waking her up, he broke the news: he had just come from a meeting with City of Light Records and Thelonious J was interested in his work.  "You're smarter about music than anyone I've ever met in my life," he had said to her, "and I really wanted to talk this through with someone before I say yes."  Abigail was delighted for him, but was also barely half-awake, so they made plans to meet later that afternoon for coffee.  Then she hung up the phone, lay her head back down on the pillow, and the last thought she had before sinking into a blissful sleep was a little thrill of delight that she had a date with Marcus Kane. 

She slept for a few hours, then woke and spent far too long - embarrassingly too long, she says now - getting ready.  Which was silly.  It was just coffee.  He just wanted to talk about music.  Clarke was at day care, Jake was at work, and there was no one to tell Abby Griffin that putting her hair up and then taking it down five separate times, trying to make a decision, was not the behavior of a person who was just doing a favor for her husband's friend.  She remembers, as though it were yesterday instead of 15 years ago, exactly what she wore - hair down her back in a sleek, simple braid, a knee-length black pencil skirt, black boots, and a plum-colored sweater that made her feel more curvy than she really was.  Marcus Kane made her feel like a cool New Yorker, not the smart but plain Midwestern girl she had felt like her entire life.  She liked the person she was when she was around him.  She felt alive, she felt sexy, she felt _whole._   She walked down the street to the coffee shop wondering what it would feel like if Marcus Kane kissed her.  She knew he would never do it - she knew she would never let him - she knew it was far too dangerous.

And yet.

She wondered.

They sat in the coffee shop for four hours, talking about music and life and New York and each other.  They stayed for so long that Abby realized she was late to pick up Clarke from day care; unwilling to bring their conversation to an end so soon, she asked Marcus if she would like to walk with her.  It was only about ten blocks away.  It was spring, she remembers, and they were strolling down a street of prewar brownstones flanked by cherry trees, arguing about the relative merits of _Abbey Road_ vs. _Revolver_ in the Beatles canon when she saw the police cars parked outside the day care.

All afternoon the cops had been trying to reach her to let her know that her husband had been shot.  They had called her office.  They had knocked on her door.  They had left voicemails everywhere.  They had been unable to track her down.  They had finally managed to get through to a coworker of Jake's who mentioned that Abby would have to go pick up Clarke from day care that afternoon and they would be able to find her there at 5:30.  Except that it was 6:15, and she was late for the first time ever, and Clarke was the last child there, and she had strolled up to the door mid-laughing conversation with a handsome man who was not her husband.  Because her husband, the police officer who had been hunting her down for the past two hours explained, was dead.

Jake was dead.

She had been drinking coffee and talking about the Beatles and very nearly holding hands with Marcus Kane in a coffee shop while her husband was trapped in an armed bank robbery and the police tried desperately to find her.  She did not know how to even begin to live with that.

And so Abigail Griffin buried her husband, packed up her life, sold her apartment, moved out of New York City, and disappeared into rural Massachusetts, intending never to see or speak to Marcus Kane again. 

  
* * *  

We know, of course, from our secure position fifteen years into the future, that that wasn't the end of the story. 

Because we know that a year and a half after Abigail and Clarke Griffin left the city, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on a sunny Tuesday September morning, and if you knew and loved somebody in New York City that day it didn't matter how long you had been estranged or how over you thought your relationship was or what else had passed between them.  You only wanted to know that the people who mattered to you were alive and safe.

Abigail Griffin's friends and neighbors and coworkers were all alive and safe.  But she could not find Marcus Kane.  She called his home, his cell phone, his recording studio.  She left messages with everyone in Thelonious J's office who would take her calls.  She called everyone she knew.  She was pacing back and forth in the two-story living room of that Massachusetts house, clenching and unclenching her fists over and over to ward off a panic attack when Marcus Kane knocked on her door. 

When she opened it and saw him standing there, she burst into tears.  And then she kissed him.

She admits frankly that it was as much about sheer relief that he wasn't dead as it was affection and desire - though both of those were present, and real.  She had convinced herself that this story would end the same way Jake's had - with Clarke lost in hysterical sobs while a stone-faced Abigail had to identify a dead body.  But there was also regret.  There was also the fear that something might happen to Marcus before she ever had the chance to say how she felt.  And so, as he stood there on her doorstep, holding a hastily-packed overnight bag, with the ash of Manhattan in his hair, on the day we all thought the world was ending, this is what she said to him.

"I'm in love with you, Marcus.  I've always been in love with you.  It didn't mean I loved Jake any less, so I'm done feeling guilty about it, because neither of us did anything wrong.  But I'm still a single mom with a dead husband and a lot of shit to deal with and I can't be anyone's girlfriend, and I can't move back to the city where my husband got shot.  This is where I live now, and this is who I am, and I can't make you any guarantees about anything except that I love you and I need you in my life.  If you need anything more than that from me, I can't give it to you; but if you're okay with this as a place to start, you should bring that bag inside and stay here for awhile."

He came inside. 

He stayed for two months. 

When he finally left, to go back to New York and work on the album that became _The Woman That Fell From the Sky_ , I ask Abigail about how they left things with each other.  She shrugs a little.

"We never called it by a name," she said.  "I never said, 'Marcus Kane is my boyfriend.'  We didn't need to discuss it endlessly.  It just was what it was.  He came out here whenever he could, and we spent time together, and it was wonderful, and then he would leave and we would all go back to our lives.  It worked fine."

"Did you never talk about marriage?" I ask.  She arches an eyebrow at me.

"He's 46," she says.  "I'm 44.  Of course we've talked about marriage."  

"But . . ."

She sighs.  "Look," she says.  "I was only a wife for a few years, when I was very young.  It was great.  I was happy.  But then I spent fifteen years after that as a single mom, and my daughter was my priority.  And I had the life I wanted.  I had work, and Clarke, and this town, which I love, and this house I love, and my own space and freedom and identity, but I also had love and affection and companionship and -" She stops.  I finish the sentence for her.

"Really great sex?"

She blushes like a teenager and looks away, and I find myself irrationally delighted by this burst of unguarded humanity. 

"I had everything I needed," she says.  "I had a wonderful life."

I ask her why she keeps referring to it in the past tense.  I ask her why she seems so certain that all of that is over now.  She looks at me, walls back up, withering scorn on her face.

"There's a stranger in my living room asking me invasive questions about my love life," she says.  "What's the average shelf life of a Hollywood marriage?  Once the spotlight is shining on you, on your relationship, it begins to wear you down."

I ask her - and I could not have told you then, and still cannot tell you now, why I felt a knot of panic in my stomach at the thought of her answer - if what she is really telling me is that she is afraid, now that she and Clarke are out in the open, no longer Marcus Kane's safe refuge, that it will be the end of their relationship.  She does not answer, but I can see that she is worried.

Now I am too.


	5. Epilogue

I come home from Massachusetts and for weeks I am in another world entirely.  I have become obsessed with decoding the secrets inside the music of Marcus Kane.  I stop listening to anything else.  I will play a song halfway through and then pause it to deliver a lecture to Kyle about the hidden messages - here a subtle reference to Jake Griffin, there a description of a bedroom that matches hers.  Finally Kyle takes his iPod back and threatens to put me on a strict diet of Taylor Swift until I can function like a human being again.  But I am a woman obsessed.  I cannot stop thinking about Marcus and Abigail.

Weeks go by, and I am surprised (and irritated, I have to admit) that Marcus Kane has still given no response - either publicly, or to me.  I still can't get anyone from his team on the phone.   It becomes a joke around the office - Raven Reyes sitting by the phone, waiting for Marcus Kane to call.  He has not made a statement, which I find totally bizarre.  He knows I know who Abigail is.  I have spent three days with her.  Why will he still not say her name out loud?  It begins to drive me crazy.  I email his press rep and explain that we are on deadline and this article is going to print with or without a quote from Marcus Kane.  She tells me that his response remains "No comment."

I try to put my finger on why exactly this bothers me so much.  Am I upset on her behalf that it feels as though he is choosing not to acknowledge her?  Is it a journalistic itch, the feeling that without Marcus Kane I only have one half of the story and the piece feels off-kilter?  Or is it something else entirely - something much less professional and much more personal?  Aren't I really only pushing so hard for the chance to ask him about Abigail Griffin because I'm dying to hear what he'll say? 

Kyle thinks it's a lost cause.  He points out that in Kane's very first interview after _The Woman That Fell From the Sky_ , when he was first asked about the identity of "The Woman," he told the reporter that he would never answer that question.  "He said everything the listener needs to know about her is inside the songs and that he would never publicly say her name unless she told him to," says Kyle.

"But we _know_ her name," I reply in frustration.

"But you didn't hear it from _him,"_ says Kyle.  _"_ That's the whole point. He's a mensch.  He made a promise and he's keeping it."

This is a valid point.  My editor makes another one.

"Has it occurred to you," she points out reasonably, "that you've spent so much time squeezing every last drop of symbolism out of the lyrics to his music that any direct answer he could possibly give you would be totally anticlimactic?  Don't you kind of already know everything about his feelings for her that you need to know?"

She's right.  I know she's right. 

And yet.

I can't help it.  I'm a sucker for a romantic ending.  I want to hear him say it.

I want to hear Marcus Kane tell me about Abigail Griffin.  Not obliquely - not dropping little breadcrumbs here and there - not with symbolism and metaphor and euphemism.  I want to hear him say her name.  It has suddenly become bizarrely, inexplicably important to me to hear him say her name. 

I try to talk myself out of it.  I ask myself what, really, it would change.   I know exactly what Abigail means to him.  So do you.  So do all of us.  We always did.  Kane only ever kept the one secret from us - her identity - and isn't that the least important one?  Didn't he already tell us everything powerful and real and meaningful already, over and over?  I know Kyle is right.  I know my editor is right. Why am I pestering Kane and his team for what would probably end up being some expertly-messaged, press-friendly quote from his PR manager which I would then be forced to print, no matter how banal?  What if I just let the story end where it ends?  What if the only thing to say about Abigail Griffin and Marcus Kane was told to us fifteen years ago in a sweet, simple melody?  There was a boy who grew up trapped inside a metal cage.  There was a woman who fell to earth from somewhere beyond the stars.  He had a lock.  She had a key. 

_"And one day the boy and his heart were set free/By the woman that fell from the sky."_

What more do I need to know than that?

***

 **POSTSCRIPT:** Two days before we go to print, a padded envelope appears on my desk.  This is what I find inside.

_Marcus Kane declined to be interviewed for this article._

**__________________________________________________**

_**Raven Reyes is a rock critic, journalist, pop culture commentator, recreational mechanic, dog lover and certified obsessive expert on the music of Marcus Kane.  She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Kyle Wick, their cat Anya, and a completely insane record collection.** _

_**Special thanks to Jasper Jordan for his generous assistance.** _

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Maybe This Christmas](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5455460) by [ChancellorGriffin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin)
  * ["The Woman That Fell From the Sky" Ficlets & Headcanons](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11536821) by [ChancellorGriffin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin)




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